Open House at RIT Observatory

Sep 28, 2012

Our main features tonight will be the 13-day-old Moon, Uranus and Neptune. Don't be surprised if you find the Moon a lot more interesting than those two outer planets ...

The Moon

Can you identify all these features tonight? The crater called "Tycho", near the bottom of the picture, is one of the most recent big craters. How large do you think it is? (Answer elsewhere on this sheet).


Background image of Moon copyright Tom Talbott.






Neptune and Uranus are both so far away from the Earth that they appear as tiny little balls of light, barely different from the faint stars around them. Can you figure out which little dot of light in the telescope's eyepiece is the planet?


Thanks for coming to the RIT Observatory! Please check our web page for future events.

http://www.rit.edu/cos/observatory/

Another good place to check is the Astronomy Section of the Rochester Academy of Sciences:

http://rochesterastronomy.com

The crater Tycho is about 86 km = 53 miles in diameter. You could fit all the Finger Lakes into its walls!